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“Okay. Might as well stay there today,” Vic said. “It’s almost dawn. You don’t want to get caught by daylight. ”
“Nope,” Ruger said. Vic knew that sunlight was not fatal to Ruger as it was to some species of vampires; all it did was hurt him. But Ruger was still supposed to be dead and his face had been on every newspaper, magazine, and Internet news feed for weeks now. Staying in the shadows meant staying off the radar. “I’ll keep out of sight, don’t worry. ”
“You know about that cluster-fuck out on A-32?”
“Yeah. Friggin’ Dead Heads. ”
“We can’t have more of that, Sport. Not now. You could do us both a favor and lock all those assholes up until the Wave. ”
“I’ll see to it,” Ruger said, his voice a whisper.
“Make sure you do. Right now I gotta get going. Mike didn’t come home last night and I need to look into it. If we’re lucky, Tow-Truck Eddie got him. ”
“You think so?”
“I should be so lucky…but something sure as hell happened and I need to know what. I’ll be in touch. ”
Ruger flipped his phone shut and tapped it thoughtfully against his chin for a moment, still smiling. Dawn was coming, but it was still dark, so he settled into the shadows to wait. The song “Time Is on My Side” occurred to him and he killed some time letting it play in his head. Corny, sure, but fun corny—and this was going to be fun. His smile never faded as the minutes of night dropped like cigarette ash on the ground around him.
At five-twenty in the morning the door across from him opened and Vic stepped out, dressed in a jeans and a big Eagles windbreaker. Ruger didn’t move, confident of the shadows around him. He watched Vic lock his back door, check the street, then climb into his pickup and drive up the alley. Vic’s eyes were human eyes—weak and stupid. Ruger kept smiling as Vic’s careful stare rolled right over him without a flicker.
The truck passed within a few yards of where Ruger stood, arms folded, leaning on one shoulder deep in the mouth of a neighbor’s side yard. Ruger grinned as the pickup turned the corner.
“Asshole,” he whispered in a voice like a dead Clint Eastwood, and crossed the street. He had no key, but the lock was nothing to him. He put a palm flat on the wood next to the door handle and gave a single short shove. Wood splintered and the dead bolt worked like a lever to tear the entire strike plate out of the frame.
“O
ops,” he said, grinning like a kid. He pushed the door shut behind him and tilted a chair under the handle to keep it shut. Have to keep up appearances.
The cellar was dark and silent, but Ruger could hear sounds in the house. He knew that if Vic was up and out, then Lois had to be up. Vic didn’t cook his own breakfast or make his own coffee. He stood at the foot of the stairs and listened to the scuff of her feet on the kitchen floor. Bare feet, no slippers. He liked that. There was a clank of a pan—Ruger caught the whiff of eggs—and then the clink of a bottle. Definitely a gin bottle; he could smell the sharp juniper aroma as she poured. Lois was starting early today.
“Goodie,” he said. And it was. Drunk would work.
He climbed the stairs. It was high time he showed Vic who really was the big dog. More to the point, it was time he showed that sneering prick who was really the Man’s favored son. The door to the kitchen was also locked and it mattered just as little. Ruger wrapped his long white fingers around the doorknob and with no effort at all pulled the whole lock set right through the hole, splintering the wood and snapping wood screws with gunshot sounds. Beyond the door Lois Wingate screamed in shock.
As he pushed through into the kitchen Ruger’s smile grew into a hungry grin. He liked the sound of that scream, his mouth watering with the knowledge that it would be the first of many.
3
They slept through the night, but as dawn approached Val woke up. She lay for a long time staring upward into the empty shadows above Crow’s bed, feeling the weight and solidity of his arm and aware that his need to protect her meant so little in the scheme of things. To her heart, sure, it was wonderful, but to her mind—a machine grinding on its own gears—nothing was strong enough to protect her. Not against her own thoughts. There was nothing that Crow could do—nothing anyone could do—to protect her from the truth of her loss. The town was polluted; there was blight on almost all the crops. Except hers, but the Guthrie farm had suffered its share of pestilence. At that moment, if she could have accomplished it she would have razed all of the crops and every building including her own house to the ground and sown the ground with salt. Not for fear of the crop diseases, but in fear of that other plague. The plague that had made Boyd what he was, which was perhaps the same plague that had drawn Boyd and Ruger to Pine Deep in the first place.
Mark’s body was in the morgue. Cold and empty, without Mark’s soul in it. Just flesh, she told herself. Not Mark at all…just an empty shell…and yet Mark had been killed by Boyd. And Boyd was a vampire. It didn’t matter that Weinstock checked on him three times a day; it didn’t matter than neither Mark or Connie showed any signs of being anything more than corpses. In a movie she’d seen once a vampire had said something about outliving his enemies by simply going to sleep for a century and then rising after they were dust. What if that sort of thing was possible? What if Mark, cold and dead as he appeared, was only waiting for some dark call to awaken him?
It was a stupid thought, she knew. Stupid, and fanciful, and utterly terrible. Val lay there and stared out through the lightless window into the blank blackness of the night and thought lots of such thoughts.
4
Mike knew that everything was broken, but he didn’t care. He didn’t know how to care anymore. The impact with the tree had smashed almost every thought out of his mind, and filtered what little remained into a single piece of understanding. “I’m dying,” he said in a wet voice.
He coughed and felt blood splash out of his mouth onto his chin. There was pain. Of course there was pain, but it was a remote island way off on the horizon of his perception. It had been there for hours, ever since he’d crashed, and it had done all the harm to him that it could. Now it was just there. He didn’t care about that, either.
“I’m dying,” he said again, smiling. It was the safest he’d felt in years.
Time, as meaningless as the rest of it, had long ago ceased to move…and yet the sky had changed. Mike couldn’t move his head and had been staring at the featureless black above him forever. Maybe he slept at times, maybe he just stared, but now the sky was less pervasively black, now there was just the faintest hint of color. A brick-red tinge dabbed here and there on the underside of the clouds.
The wind stirred, pushing some leaves around. One leaf blew against his cheek and stuck to the blood, quivering as if struggling to escape. Mike turned his eyes to look at it, saw its jagged brown edges vibrating, and it took him a few seconds to realize that he could see the color. He tried to lift one hand, wanting to see if there was enough light to see his fingers and was surprised when his hand moved. When he had tried to move his hand before it had not so much as trembled; there hadn’t been a single flicker of sensation from anything below his shoulders. That had changed now, but Mike still didn’t care. He was too busy trying to die.
There was the rustle of more leaves off to his left, not in the path of the wind, and Mike turned his eyes that way—and his whole head turned, too. His neck was no longer locked into immobility. Over there, just beyond where his bike lay, there was a man.
